Haiku Alpha 3 has been in development for more than 14 months. In that time more than 800 bugs have been identified and fixed, major sections have been updated, applications have been added and updated, and great progress has been made in supporting additional hardware. Here is a summary of updates, more details can be found here. Also inside, interviews with some core Haiku developers.

There's no reason to go chasing around the filesystem with the right-click menu on the Desktop. It's not meant to be used that way, and there's nothing forcing you to use it that way. There are multiple alternatives to achieve what you can do with the filemanager context menu. Haiku has a start menu. (the blue leaf icon) Most of the apps are there. There are "spring-loaded folders" to respond to drag&drop, you can cut/copy/paste files around, keyboard shortcuts let you move around in the filesystem. There's Alt-Tab (or Ctrl-Tab) and workspaces.. There's just a lot. Open the User Guide and find the alternatives before you hurt yourself any more.

If you can report anything about the lockup that would be very much appreciated. Hardware spec., listpci (listdev?) from e.g. Linux or from Haiku. Perhaps a syslog or serial output from Haiku. If you were doing something particular.

Hm, what's the point again? I tried it on a real PC. It's kinda fast, but surely no faster than the other os's i run.

Also, the GUI is enormously annoying (what the fekk is up with 1 million levels of nested menus? my hand hurts after 15 minutes with this OS.)

Also, locks up on my quad core - no-SMP mode kinda worked for a while.

While if you had wasted 5% of the time you did in typing this really negative reply and read the user manul, you would have noticed under prefrences tracker, you can set the window navigation to single window.

Hm, what's the point again? I tried it on a real PC. It's kinda fast, but surely no faster than the other os's i run.

Well, it's much, much faster than Windows and Ubuntu on my dual-core PC, though Puppy Linux gives it a run for its money...

Also, the GUI is enormously annoying (what the fekk is up with 1 million levels of nested menus? my hand hurts after 15 minutes with this OS.)

Wow. You really need to open your mind a little bit and play with the OS for a while. There are so many time-saving and efficient techniques for common tasks built into the OS that are different to other "traditional" operating systems that it will take a while to learn them all. Approaching it from a closed Windows / Mac / Linux perspective will not do you any favours.

Anyway, if your hand hurts, I'd seriously look at your ergonomic setup there - you could be doing yourself some damage by not using your mouse properly.

Also, locks up on my quad core - no-SMP mode kinda worked for a while.

It's not even beta, it's *alpha*. That means it's never gonna work on all configurations, it may not even have support for your CPU, or perhaps it's a motherboard issue - often motherboards are buggy, and those bugs are worked around in the driver code. There are so many of these issues in the wild that it will be a long, long time before Haiku developers get around to catering for them all.